Wednesday, 16 January 2013

Solstorm/Sun Storm by Åsa Larsson (3/5)

GoodReads says:On
the floor of a church in northern Sweden, the body of a man lies mutilated and
defiled–and in the night sky, the aurora borealis dances as the snow begins to
fall... So begins Åsa Larsson’s spellbinding thriller, winner of Sweden’s Best
First Crime Novel Award and an international literary sensation.

Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the town she’d left in disgrace
years before. A Stockholm attorney, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her
friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the revivalist
church his charisma helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone
like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall
an ambitious prosecutor and a dogged policewoman. But to help her friend, and
to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever
knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a
sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark,
wrenching, and impossible to guess...

I say: I read this in Swedish for uni and would
never have picked it up myself because I don’t like these Nordic crime novels –
honestly; they’re all pretty much the same but with different names and places.

Having said that, this was neither good nor
terribly bad; it was actually pretty ok.

I think
the reason I sort of liked this was because it involved a church full of
corruption and evil deeds, and I love that sort of thing. It was interesting to
see how all the churchgoing townspeople were determined to stick together and
keep the police out of the investigation. Another reason this was rather good
was because I grew quite fond of Rebecka; she wasn’t your typical crime solver,
but more a normal person who was determined to help her childhood friend Sanna –
and also to find out what happened to Sanna’s brother. Most of her actions were
plausible, and even though she did make some silly mistakes here and there, I believed
in the character.

All the
others, however, were such stereotypes it was painful reading about them. I could
tell the way the church was heading and what the outcome was going to be; even
though I didn’t figure out who the murderer was until a few pages before it was
revealed. In fact, if the characters had been less stereotypical I would have
liked this better.

However,
it was fast-paced and easy enough for me to finish it in one sitting without
getting bored. Larsson isn’t the best of writers, but when it comes to these
crime novels she gets the job done without too much unnecessary fuss, and I wouldn’t
mind reading the other books involving Rebecka – because of course this was
part one of a series.